Ethics

Pyrrhus and Cinéas

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Simone de Beauvoir

1944

Pyrrhus and Cinéas is Beauvoir's first work of systematic philosophy — a short but philosophically dense essay published in 1944, before The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity, that already contains the seeds of her mature existentialist ethics. The title refers to a story from Plutarch: Cinéas, the counsellor to King Pyrrhus, asks the king what he will do after each conquest, and Pyrrhus keeps naming more conquests, until finally Cinéas asks what Pyrrhus will do when he has conquered everything — and Pyrrhus says he will rest. Cinéas then asks why he does not simply rest now. Beauvoir takes this as the central question of human existence: why act at all, if all ends can be endlessly deferred and no goal is self-legitimating? Her answer develops the existentialist account of the project: human beings are not beings who have goals but beings who are their projects. The meaning of an action does not pre-exist it but is generated through the act of committing to it. This leads Beauvoir to the key ethical insight: because all projects require a world, require other freely acting subjects who can take up and extend one's work, authentic commitment to one's own freedom necessarily entails commitment to the freedom of others. One cannot genuinely will one's own liberation in a world of slaves. The essay is a remarkably economical statement of the existentialist ethical position and demonstrates that Beauvoir's ethics was original and fully formed before the major works.